In the 1956 Dominant re-release, Randolph Scott was given top billing with Humphrey Bogart as co-star. The names of Errol Flynn and Miriam Hopkins were demoted beneath the title.
When the film premiered in Virginia City, NV in 1940, the townspeople were charged an exorbitant admission fee (for those days) of $1.10 per customer (equivalent to about $23 in 2022). This was owing to the fact that Errol Flynn, Miriam Hopkins, and others from the cast had been scheduled to make a personal appearance on stage after the film's showing. However, when Flynn and the others failed to appear, enraged audience members stormed out of the theater and took the Warner Brothers entourage (including five busloads of studio personnel) hostage, demanding they get their money back. Eventually the theater's manager agreed to make up the difference by refunding the audience 70 cents apiece, thus reducing admission to its usual 40-cent fee (about $8.50 in 2022).
The name of the villain John Murrell was taken from the leader of a bandit gang that operated along the Mississippi River in the 1820s-40s. Murrell was a small time outlaw who attained legendary status due to a sensationalized account of his life and crimes published by Virgil Stewart. The largely fictional pamphlet even influenced Mark Twain, who considered Murrell to be as large a figure as Jesse James, and wrote of Injun Joe discovering Murrell's lost treasure in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The real life Murrell never traveled west of Arkansas, where various geographical features are named for him. He died of tuberculosis in 1844 - 19 years before this movie takes place. Oddly, in the film, Humphrey Bogart played John Murrell with an on-again, off-again Mexican accent. It is not at all in evidence when Murrell first appears in the stagecoach scene, but seems to grow more pronounced as the film goes on.
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